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“Footprints!”
“Sir, wait—” the sound of tires screeching to a stop does little to drown out the thud thud thud of Eddie’s heart in his ears and boots on the ground as he throws the car door open and stumbles out and starts running.
There’s a man in custody as of a little over an hour ago and a cabin still being searched up and down and sideways in the aftermath, but in which Eddie has nothing important to look for.
There’s a man found and a man lost and Eddie’s interest lies with the latter, in the finding of him before he can even begin to care about finding too what exactly happened in the past forty-eight hours.
There’s a man in handcuffs and Eddie’s raw knuckles, and the sound of bones cracking under them still echoing in his ears, contrasting a bruise already blooming on the other side of his face which Eddie has nothing to do with the making of— and then hands pulling him away and the declaration from one uniform that he’s not here, and the getting into the passenger seat with a different one and the leaving of it all behind in the pursuit after where he is.
Eddie’s spent every second since waking up at that hospital fighting against his own head and the claims of those around him and searching for a sign of life from his best friend. And now he has these prints in the sand, of which all that’s left for him to do is follow and hope that that is what’s waiting for him on the other side. A sign of life. A life.
He knows there’s a man in uniform on his tracks somewhere behind him, voice crackling into a radio with their location on his lips, and he knows that time is not on their side, the sun already announcing its upcoming set along the horizon and if the wind picks up— if it picks up the way it’s ought to do this far out in the open desert—
He can’t afford to stop. Can’t afford to focus on anything other than the soft press of life leading him onward, the desert patient and hungry and ready to erase every sign that Buck was ever here as they start to drift, veering left and then right and then a little deeper too.
A stumble here and a knee there and something darker pressed into the sand and Eddie’s chest go tight when he kneels long enough to brush his fingers over it and watch the grains smear red against his skin.
“Buck!”
It tears out of him raw and desperate, his ribs protesting the force of it as he forces himself back to his feet and pushes onward, picking up the pace as the desert swallows the sound whole because he must be close.
He must be, because if Eddie saw those prints from the road then that means Buck was running with a little more direction in his step rather than just away before veering off the side of it deep out here into the sand, too caught up in his own head or with some sort of purpose Eddie’s yet to be aware of, and he doesn’t know if he should take comfort in that, doesn’t know what Buck could possibly have been focused on in his escape, the state of mind with which he somehow managed to do it, still.
Each print in the soft sand a testimony to that desperation to put as much distance between himself and that place as possible, each one of Eddie’s a silent plea to find that of which he’s searching for with all his pieces intact. Or at the very least close; Eddie will do the work of gathering them up and putting them back together.
That, at least, he knows how to do.
Eddie’s climbing over the next rise and he almost misses it, down the other side where the sun catches the sand for a second he almost misses it because his eyes drift upward instead of ahead, pulled helplessly toward the impossible expanse of red and pink and violet stretched across the sky above him instead of ahead—
A boulder casting a long shadow across the sand and a figure slumped against the far side of it.
Oh god.
Oh god oh god oh god.
“He’s over here!” Eddie shouts over his shoulder, voice cracking across the distance toward the help he knows is coming and he’s already moving again before the words are even finished leaving his mouth.
Buck is here and he is standing up, one hand braced against the rough curve of the boulder, shoulders bowed forward beneath the weight he is leaning onto it to carry and facing away towards the setting sun and all Eddie wants is to take that hand and draw it from the sharp stone where it’s made its temporary anchor, to let Buck lean against him instead, to leave his own kind of footprints across that familiar face that is slowly turning toward him with every skidding step Eddie takes through the loose sand and—
“Stay back!”
It cracks through the air sharp with panic and Eddie stops instantly, hands lifting without thought at the wide and bloodshot familiar blues staring right at and right though him, a hollow shell of the man he’s spent the last two days tearing himself apart trying to find.
There’s blood dried dark across Buck’s temple, striped shirt torn around the collar and clinging wetly to his torso and the cuffs of it raw and streaked with red where he lifts one of his hands up unsteady but determined to ward Eddie off and keep the distance between them.
“Buck,” Eddie breathes with awe and exhaustion and searches for the right words, dares to take another step forwards but Buck is already shaking his head violently, “it’s me—”
“No, you— you stay there! I gotta go back— I gotta find— it should be here…”
He turns away again with stubborn purpose, intent on continuing whatever path he’d convinced himself was the correct one.
With a hand still pressed against the boulder, the surface of which Eddie can tell even from the feet that separate them is bearing most of Buck’s weight, the rest of him sways with the faint, treacherous motion of a body already running on far less blood than it was meant to function with.
A quiet dread settles into the hollow of Eddie’s ribs at the realization of what it all suggests, right there along the already existing cracks and still, still, he dares to ask—
“What should be?”
“The car,” Buck slurs. “It’s— he’s out here. I— I left him and he’s— hurt.”
His voice hitches and Eddie’s whole body reacts, recoiling into that same level of terror he’d felt waking up in that hospital and hearing that Buck hadn’t even been in the car to be rescued, but rather somewhere out there hurt and alone.
That terror had only grown when they found more footprints than just his and the rescue team’s around the crash site, pressed into the sand a few miles out on the other side of town. Their pattern told a story none of them has yet to be able to fully piece together.
And now Buck is trying to go back to it, to a wreck of twisted metal and shattered glass of which Eddie remembers very little and doesn’t really care to right now, except for the simple fact that—
“I’m right here, Buck. I got out.”
He tells him sternly, aiming it toward Buck’s turned back with the fragile hope that belief might work its way into him if he places enough of it there himself, enough for Buck to borrow the certainty of it and do the same. Get out.
“No,” Buck mutters thickly, almost spitting with it. “No, you’re not— not real.”
Something inside Eddie’s chest breaks open at the quiet finality of it.
The dismissal of it.
He doesn’t know what to do with that. Doesn’t know how to reach into the fog through which Buck is clearly moving and pull him back toward solid ground again. It’s a skill he’s always relied upon without thinking— learned and mastered in a different desert on the other side of the world— the standing steady in the space where someone else is falling apart until they remember how to stand beside him.
He should know how to do that now; Should know how to guide Buck of all people back out of whatever dark corridor he’s wandered into.
Instead he stands there with his hands half-raised and his heart cracking quietly along fault lines of which he hadn’t known the full depth until this moment.
Footprints run along them; Old and new alike.
Some so deeply pressed they have never truly faded, others layered over the first in ways that have blurred their edges until Eddie can no longer remember a version of himself in which they were not already there.
Buck has been leaving them for years without ever seeming to realize it— across kitchen floors and ambulance bays, across quiet nights on Eddie’s couch and arguments and laughter and the thousand small, ordinary moments that had stitched themselves into something far less ordinary somewhere along the way.
Eddie has never stopped to measure the distance of which they’ve covered, never stood still long enough to trace the pattern of them from where they first began to where they stand now.
To notice how deeply those prints run. How naturally Eddie has learned to follow them. How instinctively he has allowed them to guide the direction of his own steps.
There are realizations folded somewhere inside that thought— ones that might demand more attention under different circumstances, ones that might ask questions Eddie is not sure he is ready to answer yet.
But this is neither the time nor the place for that kind of careful excavation.
Right now Buck is still standing ten feet away, bleeding into the sand and arguing with ghosts, so Eddie gathers the pieces of himself back together as best he can, presses those quieter realizations aside for later— later, when Buck is breathing easier and the ground beneath them is not shifting quite so dangerously.
And he tries.
He ought to try.
“Look at me,” he tells him through blurred vision of tears that refuse to fall, letting the stubborn shake of Buck’s head guide him forward in his footsteps and then some, until he plants himself squarely between Buck and the setting sun.
This desert will not claim any more of their footprints.
Buck’s step falters long enough for Eddie to duck his head in search of those haunted blues again, enough for him to place his hand on trembling shoulder when Buck still refuses to meet him halfway and squeeze. Force as much intention into it as he can when he once again pleads for him to—
“Evan, look at me.”
He gives him a small shake, squeezes a little harder.
“Feel that?” Eddie murmurs, trying to ignore the ache in his chest that comes with the effort of holding himself together just as much as the man before him. “This is real, right?”
Buck’s brows furrow and he looks up and really looks at him, eyes dancing back and forth between Eddie’s, searching there for the same confirmation Eddie is trying so hard to press into him. He brings a hesitant trembling hand to Eddie’s face, dirty fingertips brushing along his eyebrow where the small butterfly bandage is still doing its quiet job.
“You were—” Buck falters, losing the shape of it halfway through and trying again. “Um… he said—”
“I don’t care what he said,” Eddie interrupts him, leaving no room for the doubt that still flickers across Buck’s face. “He was wrong.”
He holds his breath as Buck’s fingers start tracing uncertainly along the bandage and then drift over the ridge of his brow, the bridge of his nose, the hollow beneath his cheekbone and the line of his jaw. And back again.
“That’s right,” Eddie brings up one of his own hands, leaving the other still firm on Buck’s shoulder, thumb brushing carefully beneath Buck’s eye where quiet tears have begun to carve pale tracks through the dust on his cheeks. “I’m right here,” he tells him softly. “Right in front of you.”
Something fragile clears behind Buck’s eyes with the slight hitch in his breath— recognition arriving in increments, pushing its way slowly through the haze of exhaustion and pain and lies and Eddie feels as much as he sees the moment Buck’s palm starts to slide against the rocks and his knees finally buckle beneath him.
He’s there to catch him on the way down, arms closing around Buck’s weight before gravity can claim the rest of the distance between him and the ground, pulling him in close at last and lowering them both carefully into the soft sand and letting Buck’s head rest against his chest.
Buck makes a weak sound at the back of his throat that dissolves almost immediately into something softer.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes, whines, broken and uneven where it spills into the fabric of Eddie’s shirt. “I— I tried. I tried really hard—”
“You did good,” Eddie reassures him, shaking his head and swallowing hard against the burn rising behind his own eyes because his hands cannot afford to shake.
They are already moving, tearing two long strips of fabric from the hem of his shirt and pressing them carefully to Buck’s wrists, fingers steady despite the ache that pulls through Eddie’s chest at the sight of the raw skin, and binding them with careful pressure to slow the still persistent bleeding without inflicting any more pain than necessary.
“You got out, Buck, and you got to where I could find you. You hear that? You found me.”
“You found me,” Buck echoes faintly, his eyes drift past Eddie’s face toward the dying light stretched across the desert, blinking slowly beneath lids that look heavier with every passing second.
“I did.” Eddie sniffles, a wet laugh catching in his throat before he can stop it.
He finishes tying the strips of cloth, checking the pressure one last time before his hand rises instinctively to Buck’s curls.
They are tangled with dust and sweat but they are warm beneath his fingers when Eddie threads his hand through them.
And breathes.
He lowers his head, tilting close enough to say it into the sun-warmed strands of Buck’s hair, quiet and reverent and just a little bit awed by the fact that they are both still here to hear it: “We found each other.”
Buck’s breathing steadies faintly against his chest, shallow but more even now, the fragile rhythm of it brushing warm against the hollow of Eddie’s throat.
“Pretty,” he murmurs.
Eddie follows the direction of his gaze towards the sun that’s continuing to disappear slowly over the horizon, its light spilling molten across the dunes in deep amber and copper. The sand catches the glow like scattered glass, the long shadows of the rocks stretching across it in dark, winding rivers that slowly swallow the last of the daylight.
“Yeah,” Eddie breathes.
Pretty.
It settles somewhere deeper than the simple observation Buck meant it to be.
Because this place has been cruel; It has taken and taken and taken until Eddie thought it might swallow the last pieces of them both without ever noticing the difference, the way wind erases footprints before anyone can prove they were ever there at all.
And yet.
The light still spills gold across the sand and the sky still burns itself slowly into shades of fire and rust and deepening blue.
Buck is still breathing against him.
Pretty.
This desert will leave its own kind of footprints in them; Eddie knows that much already, ones that will linger long after this landscape has faded from view. Ones that will take time and patience to soften around the edges. Eddie is ready for it. To be patient.
Because those footprints don’t only mark where they’ve been lost but rather where they’ve chosen— again and again, even when the ground was too hot and the sun too merciless and the road ahead looked like nothing but more empty miles— to keep moving anyway.
Eddie lowers his gaze again.
Looks down at the man resting heavily in his arms, at the weak curl of Buck’s fingers around his own, at the familiar sweep of blond lashes against skin that has seen too much sun and too little rest.
And with one last look at the sun disappearing behind the horizon— and then at the one still burning stubbornly in his arms— Eddie knows there are many more left for the both of them to print. Together.
There’s a helicopter rising over the horizon, small against the wide sky and growing steadily larger with every passing second.
“Hey,” he murmurs softly, his hand tightening gently where it rests in Buck’s hair, and Buck blinks up at him, blue eyes round and fluttering with exhaustion, unfocused for a moment before they find Eddie’s face again and settle there.
Those eyes leave more footprints across Eddie’s heart than this desert ever could.
“Let’s go home.”